For my first niche, I figured I would start out with my personal favorite, cloud rap.
Cloud rap is a subgenre of rap consisting of low-fi, dreamy, ethereal beats which typically sample wordless vocals sung by women (most notably Imogen Heap). I saw someone on reddit describe it as “southern hip hop and add a bunch of Tumblr”, which I would say is pretty accurate.
For example, I’ll give you Lil B’s “B.O.R. (Birth of Rap)”. Produced by Clams Casino, you can hear Imogen Heaps voice being used as the central part of the beat.
Unlike most music scenes which tend be a product of their environment and location, cloud rap existed and was built on the internet.
Because of the heavy sampling, most early releases in the genre couldn’t be released officially, leaving it to live on the internet. There wasn’t one location where it existed, rather it was places like rap blogs, Youtube, and SoundCloud.
Traces of cloud rap can be found as early as 2001 with the rap trio cLOUDDEAD’s self-titled album. Houston rapper Viper was also making cloud rap in the early 2000s, although he didn’t emerge from obscurity until 2013 when his 2008 album You’ll Cowards Don’t Even Smoke Crack became a meme.
It wasn’t until 2009 when Bay Area rapper Lil B dropped his second album, 6 Kiss. The album was almost entirely produced by Clams Casino and featured some of the most influential songs in the genre such as “I’m God” and “B.O.R. (Birth of Rap)”. Clams Casino’s production on these songs were some of the blueprints of the genre and continue to be influential today.
Lil B’s discography is interesting because there is a lot (and I mean a lot) that could just be considered a joke. He didn’t start to fully get his flowers until everyones favorite rappers came out and talked about how big of an influence he was.
Speaking of Clams Casino, he also worked with A$AP Rocky on his debut mixtape, Live. Love. ASAP. This album led to be what was cloud raps most mainstream work yet. Filled with woozy psychedelic beats, the mixtape reached widespread critical acclaim.
If you want to get into cloud rap, I would recommend this as a starting point as it blends all of the characteristics of the genre into a consumer friendly form.
Another massive part of cloud rap is southern hip hop group Raider Klan. While a lot of their members went on to be massive parts of SoundCloud and emo rap, members like SpaceGhostPurrp, Chris Travis, and Black Kray were pioneers in cloud rap.
Chris Travis’ release of Codeine and Pizza in 2012 is an amazing cloud rap mixtape that still is played today if you find the right people.
SpaceGhostPurpp and Black Tray were extremely influential underground but the both of them caught a lot of beef with other, more mainstream artists that hurt their career. SGP in particular fell out with A$AP Rocky and the A$AP Mob as well as members of Raider Klan and kinda lost it all right as he was blowing up.
While all of that was happening in the states, Yung Lean was popping up in Sweden. In 2013 he dropped his song “Ginseng Strip 2002” which went on blow up on Youtube.
This video and Yung Lean in general went insanely popular after it dropped and if you were in middle school/high school in 2013, I guarantee either you or one of your friends wore bucket hats and drank Arizona. That’s Yung Lean.
He got the same treatment that Lil B did with a lot of music being pushed to the side and dismissed as “meme rap” but it really was much more. You wouldn’t have artists like Lil Peep, Lil Uzi Vert, or XXXTENTACION without Yung Lean paving the way first.
Where is cloud rap now though?
If you look at the artists I mentioned above, you would find that most of them make music that sounds nothing like cloud rap anymore. Since the genre was made by and for the internet, it’s going to be constantly evolving until it looks nothing like where it started.
That seems to be the problem with most micro genres though. When something is so niche and specific, you can run out of creative things to do while still sticking to the barriers of the sound.
But how else would music evolve?
-Cassidy